Long Pauses

Tag: Region: Afghanistan

  • Earth and Ashes (2004)

    Earth and Ashes (2004)

    Dir. by Atiq Rahimi

    Days after his village is destroyed in a bombing raid, Dastaguir (Abdul Ghani) and his five-year-old grandson Yacine (Jawan Mard Homayoun) jump from the back of a pickup truck and take their seats at a desert crossroads, where they wait and wait for a ride to a nearby mine. Dastaguir is charged with the horrifying task of notifying his son that the young man’s wife and mother are dead and that his son, Yacine, is now deaf. Dastaguir is worried for his son’s sanity and is plagued by memories of his daughter-in-law’s shaming, which he was unable to prevent.

    As I stepped out of the theater, a woman beside me dismissed Earth and Ashes as an “Afghani Waiting for Godot“; I agree with the description but not the dismissal. Here, unlike Beckett’s play, the absurdity of the situation is grounded in a real historical moment. Earth and Ashes is not only an allegory for some vague existential crisis (though it is certainly also that); instead, the film reveals the human cost of a particular tragedy. By the time Dastaguir recounted the story of his village’s destruction to the fourth stranger, and after hearing yet one more weary soul beg God’s blessings for the dead, I began to experience something of the old man’s exhaustion and helplessness. To be frank, I was embarrassed by it — embarrassed to be sitting in an air conditioned movie theater while on vacation, taking “pleasure” from the suffering depicted on screen. (Doug and I had a great discussion afterwards about film tastes and political sensibilities, but I’ll save that one for another day.)

    Earth and Ashes is a jaw-droppingly beautiful film as well, shot on location in wide-angle 35mm (Scope?) and featuring countless elegant crane and tracking shots. In his introduction of the film, Rahimi recounted the risks he and his crew faced by shooting in Afghanistan, particularly because the film features female nudity. The landscape, he claimed, is critical to the story, and I would agree, even extending the concept to the landscapes of Afghani faces, young and old.

    Existentialism — to borrow momentarily from my acquaintance’s allusion to Godot — demands that we find some measure of hope in our suffering, that in our acceptance of life’s absurdity we are making some heroic gesture toward freedom. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus writes. Rahimi seems driven by a similar conviction. I’m going to cheat and borrow from Doug’s review:

    the final sequence of the film is comprised of a gradual focus: a man leaves a conversation, walks through the desert, becomes isolated, begins to sing. The image fades but his singing continues in darkness, a tribute to human dignity and its perseverance through time.

    Despite the hectic pace of the film festival, the audience sat quietly for two or three minutes in complete darkness, listening to the old man’s song. It plays like a benediction. Highly Recommended.

  • Homebody/Kabul

    Instead of beginning my dissertation prospectus, which really should be occupying a larger chunk of my life right now, I’ve discovered all sorts of distractions that can be justified away as “research.” The most recent was Tony Kushner’s play, Homebody/Kabul, which I picked up in hopes that it might be useful when it comes time to write my conclusion — you know, in the spring of 2004. See how it works? By reading a play a year-and-a-half in advance, I avoid feeling guilty for my inexcusable procrastination. The story of my life.

    I’m hesitant to draw any conclusions after only one reading of Homebody/Kabul, except to say that, once again, Kushner has proven that he writes dialog with more magic and beauty and poetry than anyone since Shakespeare. Quite a claim, I know, but I’d defend it against all comers. Only Kushner could weave such a confounding and sublime metaphor from a description of computer networking, spoken by the homebody of the title, a woman disillusioned by loss and her lifeless husband:

    I understand none of it and indeed it’s quite impossible imagining my husband having to do in any real way with processes so . . . speedy, myriad, nervous, miraculous. But that parti-colored cloud of gas there, in that galaxy there so far away, that cloud there so hot and blistered by clustering stars, exhaling protean scads of infinitely irreducible fiery data in the form of energy pulses and streams of slicing, shearing, unseeable light — does that nebula know it nebulates? Most likely not. So my husband.

    87 words from an Act 1, Scene 1 monologue that extends through 21 pages and a full hour of the performance, a monologue that sifts through the 5000 year history of Afghanistan, drawing out the beauty and the barbarity of a nation whose troubles have so recently become enmeshed with our own. Homebody/Kabul began rehearsals at the New York Theatre Workshop in October, 2001. This fact has led so many critics to call the play “eerily prescient” that Kushner’s boyfriend has suggested that he adopt it as a drag persona: Ms. Eara Lee Prescient. It is odd to read the play now, knowing that Kushner’s obsession began years before the rest of us knew what a Taliban was or that such thing as a Northern Alliance even existed. Maybe “cared” is a better word than “knew” for that last sentence.

    Hopefully I’ll have a full response to Homebody/Kabul written some time before Thanksgiving. Anything to keep me from that prospectus.

  • Hauerwas, Bush, and Alexander

    After listening to me ramble incessantly, a professor recently pointed me toward Stanley Hauerwas. I now see why. Hauerwas is a professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, where he has earned a reputation as an outspoken critic of the complacency that has come to characterize much of the American Christian church. I’m on my way to the library to grab a book or two, and at the top of my list is A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity, which sounds like it may have been written explicitly for me. Should be interesting.

    Hauerwas is a ridiculously prolific writer, but here’s an interesting and timely introduction. When asked what advice he would give to President Bush, he responds:

    It’s a tricky question because, if he had asked me, he wouldn’t have been President! (Laugh) So, I’d say, “You need to tell the American people the truth.” This is still about oil. We intervened in Kuwait to protect Saudi oil. You can say, “Well, gee, don’t you think you ought to oppose a tyrant?” Look, the United States is very selective about which tyrant it’s going to pursue. When Indonesia invaded East Timor twenty-five years ago, we didn’t do anything. Why? East Timor didn’t have any strategic interest to us. Bin Laden is clearly motivated by the fact that the United States is in Saudi Arabia. We’re in Saudi Arabia to protect the oil. We need to say that the reason America has such a problem is because we’re such a rich country, and we depend on the resources of the rest of the world. Therefore, maybe the best thing we could do… I mean, rather than saying, “Well, what can you do to support a reaction against bin Laden” — rather than saying “Go out and shop” — maybe he should have said we should put a three dollar tax on gas. (Laugh) That way we won’t use so much of it. That would have been a sacrifice. Yeah, I’d say, “Tell the American people the truth about these matters.” I’m not sure that people around the Bush Administration even know the truth because they need to tell themselves lies about what they’re doing — and they believe the lies — in order to carry forward.

    And later:

    I distrust words that try to explain. I think that we’re desperate to find some explanation when there just isn’t an explanation. I mean, George Bush saying, “Why did they do this? Because they hate us because we are free.” That’s not what they’re saying. They say that they’re enacting jihad against the infidel who they think are deeply corrupt. I think even to accept that — I mean, it doesn’t explain what was there. Of course it’s helpful to get certain kinds of background to put it into perspective, but the idea that somehow or other we’re going to understand this is a little bit like people wanting to have a conspiracy theory around Kennedy’s assassination. We so hunger for some reason that this might embody and make it intelligible to us. But genuine evil is not intelligible. Bin Laden understands some of this. He wants the action to be senseless. And it is senseless because he wants it to call into question America’s sense of non-vulnerability. And he certainly did.

    And along those same lines . . . In January, Laura Bush stood with Hamid Karzai and said:

    We will not forget that 70 percent of Afghans are malnourished.

    We will not forget that one of every four children dies by the age of five because of lack of health care.

    We will not forget that women were denied access to medical care — denied the right to work, and denied the right to leave their homes alone.

    Her speech echoed the sentiments voiced by her husband repeatedly since the days immediately following the start of the U.S. bombing campaign:

    In our anger, we must never forget that we are a compassionate people. While we firmly and strongly oppose the Taleban regime, we are friends with the Afghan people.

    But, of course, the rhetoric of compassion is quite different from the practical problems of “nation building.” Like many opposed to war in Iraq, one of my main concerns has always been “the day after.” What do we do after we have destabilized a dictatorship? What do we do after, in Hauerwas’s words, “we bomb a Stone Age country back into the Stone Age”? If Afghanistan is any indication, then not much:

    “Rather than getting out there in a leadership role and saying, ‘We need a Marshall Plan,’ and fighting for it, they’ve taken a minimalist approach,” complained Joel Charny, a vice president of Refugees International.

    He’s right. The reconstruction funds the Bush White House requested for Afghanistan have been flowing slowly to the country. Moreover, several months ago the White House opposed an effort in Congress to add $200 million to the total. And the total number of US troops committed to rebuilding — after the doubling — will be 340. That’s not a lot.

    Word of the day: nomothetic adj.

    • Of or relating to lawmaking; legislative.
    • Based on a system of law.
    • Of or relating to the philosophy of law.
    • Of or relating to the study or discovery of general scientific laws.

    Maybe some context would help. From Jeffrey Alexander’s Fin de Siecle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason:

    In the postwar period, general sociological theory has been associated with the search for nomothetic knowledge. It has been viewed, by its proponents and critics alike, as the crowning glory of the positive science of society. (90)